RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Side Out Burger, California Style

“What do you think?” my waitress proudly asked.

“Well, sure, it’s a great hamburger,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking mystified, “what do you think about the place?”

Let’s keep things in perspective. Yes, Randy and Sinjin’s Side Out does serve an excellent burger, half a pound in weight and about half a foot wide. The lettuce may be a tiny bit tired and the pickle a little unexpected (a sour dill sliced lengthwise), but this is a good beefy handful anyway, which you just have to eat kind of fast or the whole-wheat bun will decompose in your hand.

But I doubt many people come here for the food, even on Saturdays, which are Buck-a-Burger days. They come because Randy Stoklos and Sinjin Smith are top professional volleyball players, and they have seen fit to lend their names to this huge El Segundo bar.

My volleyball informants tell me the local players actually boycott the place (or at least boycotted it when it opened last summer), because El Segundo is the home territory of Stoklos and Smith’s chief rivals. No matter; non-volleyballers are extensively catered to. Any beachy sport will do--along with the abundant volleyball paraphernalia, there are tables made from surfboards and Body Glove stickers pasted here and there on the floor.

People come for the continuous sports videos and the Wednesday night invitational knee-volleyball tournaments. Or maybe they come for the pool table and the arcade games, or the $1 cocktails on Sunday, or the disco with an announcer who gives away Side Out T-shirts. Or maybe they come for a touch of class; this is one sports bar where you can buy a shot of any of about 20 perfumes or colognes in the rest rooms. The puny wine list does offer Dom Perignon ($125 a bottle).

Maybe they come for the happy-hour buffet, 4 to 8 p.m. on weekdays, although (apart from vegetables and dip) the free eats are not exactly sports training food, being mostly pretzels, potato chips, chowder crackers and two hot casseroles a night. Some of the casseroles aren’t bad (for instance, the chicken with onions and bell peppers), but one night I had something stunningly vague that might have been scalloped potatoes, or maybe scalloped tortillas.

In our gourmet-conscious age, the house salad is known as “Our Signature Salad.” To tell the truth, lettuce with grated cheese is not really the most distinctive signature in the world; anyway, nobody is claiming the nachos or the tostada salad, with their gooey brown chili beef, are anybody’s signatures. Or the blue cheese-less chicken wings.

However, Side Out does have good oysters and steamed clams, the latter with both drawn butter and an intriguing sauce that tastes like clam juices mixed with Italian dressing. And there are some pretty good sandwiches. The chicken croissant comes with either teriyaki or a (particularly viscous) barbecue sauce on the side; the tender steak seems to be served on only one half of a roll, but it’s hard to tell--the rest might be down there somewhere under the forest of salad stuff and cantaloupe slices. The vegetable croissant sandwich, which is mostly mushrooms and sprouts, pales beside them.

There are two desserts to choose from: chocolate-chocolate cake sprinkled with walnut or vanilla ice cream--a full pint of Haagen-Dazs. You know it’s a full pint because it’s served in the carton, with a shot of either Kahlua or Amaretto on the side.

One of the volleyballers who dined with me sniffed at the place. “This is just what somebody from the Midwest thinks California is like,” she said. Hey, it’s what a lot of Californians think California is like.

Randy and Sinjin’s Side Out, 2171 E. Rosecrans Ave., El Segundo; (213) 640-2727. Lunch and dinner 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-2 a.m. Sunday. Full bar. Parking lot. All credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $26-$40.